Great Regulars: With the visual arts, however, things

are even more ambiguous. While no one would doubt the existence of Jewish literature, the very phrase "Jewish Art" is still contested--even, ironically enough, in the pages of Jewish Art. Samantha Baskind and Larry Silver, the authors, acknowledge in their introduction that, almost half a century after Rosenberg, "no sole definition of Jewish art has universal applicability." They begin by inviting the reader to "consider two paintings" of haystacks, one by Camille Pissarro, who was Jewish, and one by Claude Monet, who was not. In his lifetime, Pissarro was "often singled out as a 'Jewish artist,' " above all during the Dreyfus Affair, when many of his fellow-Impressionists revealed themselves as anti-Semites. Yet simply by looking at their canvases, Baskind and Silver ask, "can we determine what distinguishes Pissarro's painting [from Monet's] as an example of 'Jewish art?'"

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Seeing Double

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